An uplifting and useful book of activism.
Two activists offer a comprehensive guide to regaining ownership of American civic life in an era of minoritarian rule.
Early on, Sage, co-founder and chief brand officer of Betches Media, and Amick, founder of For Facts Sake, advocate for “civic engagement [as] a form of self-care,” especially for individuals and communities struggling with what have become major ills for American society and politics in the 21st century: “individualism, socioeconomic stratification, and isolation.” The advent of the internet and especially social media has not only fostered siloed communities of like-minded people and discouraged in-person interactions; it has also cultivated optimal conditions for the rise of oligarchs who have allowed corporate exploitation of the masses and who are themselves beholden to corporate interests through such avenues as dark money political campaign donations. The authors argue that conscious civic action is the way forward through all the helplessness and hopelessness that characterize our present political landscape. Toward that goal, the authors provide a variety of resources, including a personality quiz readers can use to determine whether their qualities make them leaders, givers, connectors, or creators; reflection exercises on civic interests; rules for political action; and a mini-tutorial on the structure of American government. In a “republic that elects its representatives democratically,” citizens must actively monitor the issues they care about and the officials who hold office while networking with each other to fight minoritarianism and the isolating hopelessness it brings. The voices in this book, including Betches social media followers, in addition to the how-to format, suggest a primarily young target audience. Nonetheless, the authors’ insights will undoubtedly interest anyone who seeks to revitalize the civic consciousness and activity of what they call the “Exhausteds…a mix of traditional and passive liberals, moderates, and those who are politically disengaged.”
An uplifting and useful book of activism.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668053485
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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